It's nearly 2am and what better time to blog is there?  It's the second night (rather, morning) in a row that I can't put my book down and fall asleep.  No, not the same book.  Because last night, I finished the first one.  Today, I got my hands on book two of The Hunger Games.  I'm nearly halfway done.  And while I come across to some of you as a girl who tears through books, I'm not.  I read often, but the argument could be made that I don't read a lot.  Because reading a lot means reading fast, and that, I don't.  So unless some book raps me so up into it that I can't pull myself away from it's pages without a lot of paper cuts, it takes me weeks (at least!) to read them.  Not here.

When I finally read the final words of the first book of The Hunger Games, I was just thinking how happy I was that in a few hours I'd be in a book store and could grab the next.  It's painful.  I'm literally loving and hating them all at the same time.  My body was entirely tense, to the point that I was lying there shaking, for hours.  I don't think that's a normal reader's response, but it was mine.  I get invested.  That's just how I am.   To books, to people, to dreams.  And my physical body becomes affected by whatever is gripping my mind and thoughts.  So I shook and worried and wrestled through the pages, knowing all along that the end couldn't give respite.  Not to Katniss, not to Peeta, not to me.

I knew it so deeply that I dreamt for hours and hours about them, about District 12 and about The Hunger Games.  I woke up several times confused, and having to sort out what I'd read and what my mind had added in dreams.  If I've done that before, literally getting lost all night in a world of my own dreams, drawn by some other author's hands, it was many years ago.  The days when I'd regularly read until my eyes couldn't focus on one more word.  When I'd wake up with a book wide open, face down on the floor beside my bed, or on my face.